Puddle Dancing

I wish I could more easily harken back to the person I was before life started feeling heavier. I don't think there's anything wrong with me or the person I've become, but I do sometimes feel nostalgic for the version of myself who believed a bit more limitlessly in people and possibility. I think it is a rule that time here can make the world feel more tedious and I do think adulthood is full of obligation and routine that can feel joyless. I remember the human I was before kids and career and mortgage with a sense of levity; the entire world is available and the only obligation is to choose which of multiple paths that lie ahead would be your preference in any given moment.

That moment directly after college where you choose your next step; you could literally choose anything. Any path you wanted that didn't lead directly to starving or being unable to pay your student debt. Or the moment in college when you're newly moved out of your parents' house and the only big decision is what subject you want to study relentlessly for the next four years. I wish I had embraced that freedom a bit more; yet, I have always been a 94-year-old in a younger person's body.

It is that same old-lady persona that makes adulthood feel just a bit heavier. I approach nearly every life decision and event as though it has the gravity of the moon-landing (oh man...puns for days and days and days).

The actual truth, if I take a moment to reflect, is that almost none of our decisions matter in the slightest. The thing you thought you were going to be doing is rarely the thing you end up doing and the things in your life that bring you the most joy are nearly never the things you thought would. The person you end up spending your life with is often nothing like your type at twenty two and the geographical location you ultimately call home probably isn't the one you would have chosen at eighteen. We make these predictions and we fret over our trajectory and our problems when in actuality we have so little control over any of it.

And even if we did, do we really trust ourselves to know which of our longings would end in happiness? I think I'd probably get a terribly enormous amount wrong. The things that make me happiest now are not things I could have mapped out in a ten-year plan.

I cherish the way the leaves bud in the spring and the feeling in the morning air when fall is just around the corner. I love checking on my kids before I go to bed and looking closely for the semblance of a change in their faces, gazing closely to cling to the fleeting last moments of babyhood in their rested countenance. I love the way my fingers feel on the keys of the piano (like home) and the way words sometimes stream easily from my brain into writing as though they have been placidly yearning for escape. I like the feel of my sheets in the morning and the elation after a long run. I like the way connecting with my oldest friends feels and the joy I experience watching my brothers work ceaselessly to improve their respective corners of the world.

None of these simple, uneventful discoveries of joy is in any way related to anything I worried about at twenty. It is all just one marvelous unfolding after another, with undeniable pain and tragedy, but also heaps of joy and exuberance. But none of it was sought after or yearned for or urgently desired. And it seems to me that this is the way of life; we think of a thing and are handed another and it is in the embrace of that other life--the one of which we could not have conceived--that our minutes are spent. These precious and fleeting moments find themselves passing, passing, passing and the opportunity for joy is nearly always something of a surprise, a silver lining and a grace placed quietly beside us without fanfare.

Today, my children danced in a puddle for twenty minutes, emerging thoroughly mud-drenched and giggling. The first hint of tulips are breaking through the soil in defiance of several feet of snow that sit in heavy clouds over the mountains. I am listening to a song that connects me deeply to my humanity and asks me to feel more deeply than I have been able for most of the day. And most importantly, I find myself here tonight (quietly), with you.